Praise You
by Homeslice
Summary: The countdown to a hundred bowls of ramen. [Every little serving means he's a little less alone, a little more at home in his body. But it does not, however, mean he is happy.] RamenNaruto SasukeNaruto NarutoSakura JiraiyaNaruto IrukaNaruto


1Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Summary: The countdown to a hundred bowls of ramen. (Every little serving means he's a little less alone, a little more at home in his body. But it does not, however, mean he is happy.)

Pairing: Ramen/Naruto, Sasuke/Naruto, Naruto/Sakura, Iruka/Naruto, Jiraiya/Naruto

- - - -

_For us poor imbeciles there is still a life before death. -Zazie_

- - - -

.one, two, buckle my shoe

Iruka-sensei worries about his children. His concerned, clammy hands are all over the beat-up Naruto's face and shoulders, and he seems to notice that Naruto doesn't feel the touches register.

His hands slip unceremoniously down to the beat-up Naruto's pants, and then unquestioningly slide back up. "Sorry, Naruto."

He says this because he doesn't know how in the world you're supposed to apologize for something like that.

- - - -

.three, four, shut the door

Naruto shuts the door on the men who come in ANBU masks with baskets of food.

Later, he will sit at his small kitchen table and think over this, again and again, right after Jiraiya has brought him a package of similar fruits and vegetables. Earlier than that, a year or so before, when he works so hard to beat Sasuke, he will wonder if perhaps had he accepted the baskets, he would've been stronger, and gotten more nutrients in him.

As it is, the Naruto of now prefers the feel of his skinny arms wrapping around a hot bowl of ramen at the shop a few streets down.

For whatever reason, he knows it by heart-, he wants to become Hokage someday and that means being a great ninja but he always, always, _always _loses his way to the academy.

---

On one of these occasions, when he travels dull and alone and equally as lost, is the time he stumbles across Sasuke.

What's on his mind is the anxious thoughts that Iruka-sensei will be angry if he is late for school again-, but he still stops for a moment to smile over his shoulder at the boy down at the docks, who looks impossibly more alone than him.

If he were not a child (and children do not have bitterness), he would have spitefully thought that no one could be as or more alone than he, and would have walked ahead without the curve of lips.

Instead he thinks that if that boy is late like he is going to be, and if Iruka-sensei yells at him, he will cover for him– say he kept him back up at the docks playing.

---

The first time Naruto is not late for school is when he is eight and a half, and he tags behind the apathetic boy he later comes to know as Sasuke– gleefully taking pleasure in the way the boy keeps turning his head over his shoulder, to make sure Naruto is still following.

Later this will probably be come to known as because they are lost without each other. Here Naruto is content chugging along behind a boy who knows misery at least as well as he does, still tasting it on his tongue and having the remnants of it smeared over his face, all the blood that cannot be washed off.

Even later Naruto will not ask for permission before leaning over without a word and licking the spots on Sasuke's face that look like they might be splattered.

- - - -

.fix, six, pick up sticks

Naruto, nine years old and drenched to the bone, watches an equally aged Inuzuka Kiba spring across the training field with a bounce in his step that is not quite gracefulness, not quite clumsiness.

It's something akin to happiness, tossing the sticks he had picked up off the ground for his dog, and Naruto knows none of it– he stands in the rain and is soaked, but not in a way that Kiba is. Kiba has some sort of unspoken guard against things seeping through his skin, because he is happy.

He knows the puzzle pieces of companionship, and Naruto thinks that if even for a moment he could have a dog like Akamaru, or a bird, or a fish, or mostly a friend, he would not be standing there feeling wet and uncomfortable, and like he is going to cry.

When Akamaru gives a joyful leap into the air and catches one of the thrown sticks in his mouth, Naruto gives in and cries. He doesn't stop crying until he is twelve.

---

The day Naruto stops crying is when he learns Kage Bunshin.

He has felt uncomfortable around Iruka for four years (almost his whole hand, and Naruto doesn't look forward to the day when he will have to lift up another finger when he counts, just for closure), still feeling cool hands and a warm forehead that rests against his chest.

The word 'Sorry' rings in his ears more than the gasping explosion of one of the clones disappearing– Iruka said it, and Naruto remembers what his teacher has said, ever since the day he told him he would teach him everything he needed to know to become a ninja.

Then, he didn't know that a shinobi has more to do with knives and hurting people than it has to do with comforting words, but underneath the kind exterior, Iruka is a manipulative man. He has to be. Konoha needs to entice it's children into becoming monsters so it can hold it's head above the blanket where behind the bed posts, the citizens crawl and snarl.

Naruto says, "I forgive you.", and even though Iruka seems confused and asks him more than once that night what he meant, Naruto knows that one day he will figure it out.

---

The ramen bowl is warm in his hands– it reminds him of every empty morning waking up to instant cups, the thirty-fifty-one hundred sit ups he does.

It reminds him, oddly, of nothing.

This is not instant ramen. It is the ramen of the Ichiraku, and since Naruto was seven years old he understood what most people do not believe until they are twenty: Food makes everything better.

Because, for a moment, when the steam drifts up to his nose and makes perspiration on his upper lip, he doesn't feel alone.

---

The day Naruto cries again, after the cruel, hardened months of not doing it, is when Sasuke dies. And then again, when Haku does, and the angry, easily irritated man named Zabuza refused to sympathize.

No one else cries that day, not Kakashi, not Sasuke, who is still alive (because Haku was a foolishly kind soul, an ignorance that extended beyond Naruto's own into the deadly realms of 'empathy' and 'preventative against using defense, even when necessary'), and Naruto gets a bridge named after him for it.

Later, he learns, while leaning over a campfire and intently, contentedly watching the designs of Sakura's face and how the flame flickers over it like a dozen wingless birds, that Sakura cried then, too– over Sasuke's body, swearing she wasn't crying.

This should comfort him, but instead he is met with the factor that maybe, just maybe, Sasuke means too much to them and where is his place in all this and that even if Sakura cries, Naruto has cried far, far more times than her.

When he gets back home he begs Sakura to take him to the Ichiraku ramen stand, and she agrees so grudgingly because she sees the desperation in his face, even not understanding it. Regardless, it is the first time Naruto eats with her, calls it a date, and walks her home, without too terribly many of her conniving remarks or tiny little 'humphs' and 'harrumphs'– and it is almost sad, because when all things get shot to hell those sounds are the things he depends on most, the sense of normalcy in them.

If Sakura is happy enough to be snide, then Naruto can be comforted with the fact that things are alright. Even if the sounds are fake.

- - - -

"It kind of sounds like she's having sex when she does that, uh?" Jiraiya asks him, as Sakura turns her nose when Naruto tries to hug her (hold your woman, hold your woman tight because you're certainly not coming back home), and makes that tiny 'humph' that makes him swoon.

He is almost thirteen and he still has not gotten over her, how she stomps off whenever he is being particularly _dumb _and how, when he really needs it, when anyone really needs it, she will give into them– later brandishing their glumness in their face with a waggling finger on a waving hand, painting shapes and names, words, while she speaks ones similar, in the same tones. "But really– you shouldn't be so gloomy over something stupid like that!"

It's just her way of saying she cares, 'What's wrong?', 'Why are you so sad?', even if her friendly shoulder punches are a bit hard and her smile is a bit rough around the edges.

Naruto makes a partly exasperated, partly annoyed, partly protective, shocked look at Jiraiya, and promptly tells him to shut up, because he's just a lecherous old man underneath everything.

Which is wrong, of course– Jiraiya, underneath, is a lonely, sorrowful man, like a big wrinkly old dog howling into the night.

Both their masters and friends and mates have deserted them-, they take a solace in each other, not knowing where else to go, only partly glad (and at the same time ecstatic, so fucking goddamn ecstatic, jumping and drooling and doing whatever the other one will say).

Jiraiya drowns all that out with sake and women who don't love him but who he, in his Jiraiya way, loves, stealing the money from Naruto's frog purse named Gama and watching Naruto wail and flail over the poor loss of all that hard earned payment and pushing Naruto around, making crude hand gestures and laughing at his own stupidity.

Naruto finds himself in the bowls of ramen, because they're always the same each time and, unlike Jiraiya's women, they do not slap you in the face.

- - - -

.seven, eight, lay them straight

Most of the days during training Jiraiya is lost in this city or that, sometimes not coming back for days.

Naruto will occasionally see him on the streets, a face among many, and by the third time it happened he has managed to keep a straight expression, one that mimics 'I don't know you' and extinguishes any viewings of pain with Jiraiya's response: 'I don't know you back'– this is when he can call himself a real ninja.

It takes one strengthened Rasengan and five bowls of ramen that is not the Ichiraku but close enough to mime a homely sense to admit that he thinks of himself as higher than he gives on. It is why he is still alive, why he didn't kill himself, why he hasn't let people kill him.

To Naruto, there is no accidental deaths. You die because you allow someone to perform murder on you, you die not because your hands slipped with a blade or you fell of a ladder tiling roofs (suspicious, isn't it, how that last death was a common one in Konoha after Orochimaru's attack and you all had to spend your time, weeks and weeks afterwards, rebuilding?) but because at some time, whether at that moment or before it, you had wished you were dead.

Once Jiraiya did not come back for a week.

On the eighth day, Naruto decided to go out and look for him, faking a shroudy confidence that was both as hazy and thinned as the clouds (something that could be brushed out of sight with even the clumsiest waving hands, something that makes Naruto wonder _why _Jiraiya, with his burly, weak flaps, took him in and did not disperse him like nearly everyone else, did not need a reason to, except perhaps that Naruto reminded him so much of himself, which is the reason for nearly all old people), although underneath he was shaking and nervous and desperate.

He was nearly hyperventilating and is well on his way to a panic attack by the time he found Jiraiya, and they discovered that Naruto had just a bit of dependancy issues ever since Sasuke left him.

---

The next day, Jiraiya hangs over him with a kind of dismissive indulgence as Naruto awakens from the night's sleep.

"I'm taking you out for ramen, damnit." he says, and then Naruto laughs so hard because it's _Jiraiya _and Jiraiya doesn't say things like that but he still managed to pass it off in such a way that it suited him, and it's relieving and confusing and he chuckles until his lungs tighten up again, and Jiraiya has to smack him on the back a few times with a ruthless, but caring fist.

"Alright, okay, I'm getting ready, jeez." Naruto says back.

---

Much later, after Jiraiya has tried (and almost got kicked out of the shop for it) haggling for the price, and Naruto had thought maybe they _would _actually lower it, if only so Jiraiya would stop yelling so loud and obnoxiously, Naruto sits with a bowl of ramen on his lap on the bedroom floor.

He keeps picking it up and setting it back down, though, because it burns through the orange cloth of his pants.

Naruto has never been burned before– he was always extra, extra careful as a child because he knew there was no one to take care of him if he did–, and he slightly wonders what it is like, disregards the thought to listening to Jiraiya's voice, which is almost soothing in the otherwise deadbeat tones of the room. It is orange– orange sheets, orange pillows, orange curtains, light pumpkin walls.

And the rest of the night is filled with quiet, religious tones, as if all behind the present is sacred, of what happened when Jiraiya was young, and there wasn't quite so much pain in the world.

"You never said happily ever after." Naruto sleepily mumbles into his orange pillow, tugging on similar sheets.

Jiraiya grins, ever the bitter man, soured by life itself and not any particular event, just all of them together. "Isn't that the truth."

---

Naruto is sure of his beginning, his middle, and his end. This makes it endlessly confusing to watch people like Sakura, his former team mate (maybe still something similar, maybe at least the same in the 'mate'), who knows not of any of them, dawdle around detail to detail, not sure of one more than the other.

Things have extreme differences, even the identical, and Naruto picks and chooses them, plays favorites with everything and wonders if maybe this is how one of his parents was, or his grandparents, or simply the cruel learned traits of hard lifestyles. Sasuke did the same thing, but _their _difference, no matter how many told them they were like brothers, was that Sasuke did _not _choose to stay with Naruto and Naruto chose to stay with Sasuke.

It is almost this that had made Naruto want to find Sasuke– nothing out of pure loneliness, because he is logical and knows that he is not really alone, but because he wants to find that small comfort as being able to boast that, out of everyone, he has a person who is very nearly exactly the same as him.

"You're talking my ear off, Naruto." Sakura says, but a kind laughter in her voice (in this, she has changed), and Naruto only now realizes he was running on autopilot and making insensible small talk and grins sheepishly.

Here he can pretend, calling her Sakura-chan and faking to blush, that things are like they used to be, and she in return does the same, calling him an idiot when they both know he is very well smarter than her or anyone, at least in his experience, and faking to be completely unmoved by his advances.

This last is proven untrue when he takes her to bed that night and it's ironic that they're both screaming different names than each other's but it's in fact the same name.

---

"You'll...have to face up to it sometime."

The words are Iruka's, even if for a moment, Naruto thinks that they are Jiraiya's. Iruka often is sentimental, but not in such a blatant, hard way-, his hands are gentle and even the callouses run smooth and his tongue is, in equivalence, dipped in honey.

Iruka telling him how much he has messed up is normally a very pleasant experience, like watching clouds on a non-rainy day or believing there is truly a calm before the storm (it's all been hectic, always, at least for Naruto-, it goes, hard, hard, hard, bam, and the soft points are few and far between).

They are standing atop the Hokage mountain for old times, but the wind that whips their face is new, and in it's

howling breaths are curses and blames.

"I know." Says Naruto, as if it is simple-, and it is, in blatantly un-simple ways.

Naruto does not beat the system. "You don't know, you think you know, and that's thinking, Naruto. Things aren't like they were and you have to face up to it, you..." Iruka trails off, chest deflated as if hands sucked him dry with an oxygen pump, although Naruto is not mistaken, because Iruka is fragile and therefore always empty.

His hollowness does not prevent the soft smile and light touch to Naruto's face. "Sorry, it's been stressful at work-, that wasn't what I meant to say. Look, your cheeks are getting wind-burn, so lets go back down, uh?"

Naruto tilts his head, thinks for a moment. "Only if you treat me to ramen."

---

Later he fiddles with his chopsticks and calls Iruka 'sensei' again.

It seems as though Naruto has aged, and Iruka, not at all, so much so that Naruto is decades ahead of him-, they are, indeed, in whole different worlds, and it feels as though those two and a half years away from Konoha made it deadbeat and horrible.

It is like a kicked can, rattling down the cement, and he chooses not to flatten it. Naruto is too sentimental and he still calls this place 'home' and it might possibly be the reason why he has not turned and became a missing-nin-, instead promising that for later.

Once Sasuke is back home, and it doesn't feel unreasonably like one of them is getting more than the other. It has to be equal-, is that not what they were always doing as children when they pushed each other, back and forth, as in a yo-yo? (Better yet, where was Sakura in all of this? For a moment Naruto stops to ponder about the semantics of his female friend, thinking that he and Sasuke can hardly find their place as it is, and yet Sakura is the sanest, the most beautiful, the better off. Nothing makes sense anymore, and oddly, it doesn't have to. Speech is better jumbled, because then no one can tell what you are thinking.)

Naruto asks a question: "Where are we?"

"That's a good question. I might even ask it myself." Says Dream-Sasuke.

---

Sasuke is low and far behind, because he is a sort of broken nobility and it becomes him. What looks good in decoration, that is what they become, and Naruto has grown up older than he should've been and he isn't the adorable sort of whiney as he was so much as he is irritatingly so and his sun kissed skin ended up more like a bratty little boy who played in the mud. He is not innocent or naive so much as he is arrogant and ignorant and those traits are not very pretty on him-, they are just frustrating.

If this is what Sasuke saw he would become, then Naruto understands why he left. In moments, for short periods of time, he hates himself, even if there are those few people (and he can only count them on one hand again, never experiencing the woes of going farther than five, but at the same time he now longs for a larger number and to take that extra step) who still love him or like him as he is and have come to accept that he grew up.

Iruka only pretends he still loves Naruto, and perhaps he himself does, in a manner that is the fact of pretending so long and hard out of selflessness or longing for how it used to be that he truly believes he does. Naruto won't go saying to him that he really doesn't, because until Sasuke comes back, or things fix themselves, he can't lose anything else.

Sakura still loves Naruto because she is Sakura and he is Naruto-, because that is as far as she will look into things. They are they, and that is how it is.

And Naruto is one step above Jiraiya, who also loves him wholly and purely, because he too has started saying that.

"We'll bring Sasuke back," says Sakura– means it. Because she is a solid person and neither of them can believe anything else for now.

- - - -

Author's Note: Lordy. I am sorry that this is not my best, but in an odd-eth way, I like it. The Ramen/Naruto is more of something that gets him through, I think-, almost not a pairing, but it's screwed up and THERE enough that it IS. I like to think of it as the thing that holds him up in the worst of times-, he even requests it when he's feeling especially bad, here-, and as he gets more support and happiness and people and HOPE (most of all hope, I would say, I like to think) etc., he needs less and less of the ramen, and it slowly filters out.

You could just take it as a very sloppy, cheap Ramen/Naruto that fades away because the authoress got lazy, but that's not exactly how I meant it. I'm very worried about this seeming that way-, if you don't look, that's probably exactly what you'll find.

But here I am hoping you'll get what I mean with it all, and maybe, perhaps, out of the goodness of your hearts, sincerely enjoy it. Yes, this is most definitely something similar to requesting pity sex-, pity entertainment. XD

As for the Iruka molesting Naruto, I really don't mean OOC-ness or Iruka-hatin' or anything like that. To me, Iruka almost is in character, as far as I could go for not really experiencing him much-, I'm not THAT big of a fan, so I never payed close attention, simple as that. I actually think his reaction was fairly in character-, he pulled away, apologized, since it was, to me, pretty much just an experiment-, the shark biting a man's leg off because it's curious as to what he tastes like. That's all I took it as, although maybe a little bit of underlying feelings. :3

The Jiraiya/Naruto could easily be taken as a father/son relationship of sorts, I suppose, if you're not a fan. The Naruto/Sakura is...rather canon, and by the end I only took it as 'Naruto has a crush on Sakura, Naruto grows out of it, Sakura plays the mother hen as is her character and they have a real nice platonic, almost sibling-like, bond'.

The Sasuke/Naruto...it really speaks for itself.

This was a difficult challenge, but almost, not really. I'm...pretty okay with finding my way around crack pairings, all modesty aside. I like thinking I'm able to, and even if this wasn't very close to being what I had in mind (to be honest, I wanted a very psychological...yes, I admit: sexual, relationship for Naruto and his Ramen, lawlz, smack me), and I don't think the psychological introspection came across anywhere except perhaps a bit in the 'Naruto's panicking over being left behind, hyperventilation blah' part because...you know, that's fairly messed up in the head, and I'd honestly expect it after what he's been through. Just a thing, for me.

Soundtrack? God only knows, but particularly 'Pedestrian' by Unbelievable Truth, and a smidgen of 'Roadside No. 2' and 'Landslide' also by them. IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES, and they got me through. X3

For T.I.B.E.-sway- (faeriepunks on LJ), because we're horrible, horrible people. :3 3 You're a doll, really, especially since you indulge my terrible crack pairings and make me write them for you and support me all the way through. 33 (BE MY GOD? XD)

End notes. :3

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